MVTAB Hears Public Concerns About BLM Plan

By WESLIE STRATTON

Moapa Valley Progress

Public comments regarding the BLM Draft Resource Management Plan (RMP) dominated the Moapa Valley Town Advisory Board meeting agenda on Wednesday, January 14. Those in attendance were given the opportunity to voice concern and opinion concerning the RMP.

Clark County Commissioner Tom Collins attended the meeting and explained that in addition to the short public comment period extension that was granted by the BLM, he is formally requesting an additional 12 month extension with a minimum of three additional town hall meetings to be held. He, along with other commissioners, will present the request in a formal resolution in a County Commission meeting today.

“I can’t emphasize how important it is that we write it down, send it in, email, letter form, readable and so forth like that,” Collins said of the public comments.

Moapa Valley Water District Trustee Lindsey Dalley is one of many concerned about the RMP who has taken the time to study and report his findings.
“The alternatives that they’ve given us do not address common citizens or communities, they only address the environmental or urban and there’s more to public land than what they’ve proposed,” he said.

Dalley said that his study of the RMP socioeconomic baseline report produced numerous “huge” issues that would affect the community.
“I would say they are fatal flaws,” he said, adding that an overview of economic study within the report defines the geographic area and characterizes it in terms of land, area management, population and more.
“That’s one of the fundamental points of this RMP, is defining what it is they’re discussing,” he said.

Dalley read a segment of the plan and abbreviated his findings.
“The bottom line is, they’re saying ‘You know what? Anything outside of Clark County doesn’t matter.’ That’s what they’re saying,” he said. “Unfortunately that’s a flawed concept.”

Dalley said that the Nevada State Engineer’s closure of five hydrological basins that surround the Moapa Valley community greatly affects where water can be accessed. The BLM has given no consideration or discussion to the issue, he said.

“This basically is a great concern because we as communities up here get our water, have to transport across public lands and we have plans to get water off other public lands,” he said. “But now with these alternatives, none of those address how to do that and it is next to impossible to go through the process.”

“So the BLM has not addressed their own socioeconomic issues of what’s happening outside of Clark County because one of those basins (with accessible water) is in Lincoln County.”

Dalley said that due to atomic tests on the Nevada test site, 18 water hydrological basins were contaminated and that is water that the Las Vegas community will never get back. That has caused regional urban water purveyors to look to northeastern Clark County as a source for supplying water to the Las Vegas valley, he said. This puts them in direct competition with the Moapa Valley Water District local water resources.

“As the federal government created the whole atomic contamination up there…it would at least be fair that the BLM, as a federal agency, look at how to mitigate that problem that Clark County now sits with,” Dalley said.

Dalley went on to express concerns regarding the Warm Springs area that has been designated as critical habitat for the endangered Moapa dace. He said that the designation has severely encumbered the communities.

“Again, the BLM has not addressed that fact or created any alternatives that would compensate our communities or allow our communities to spread out our water resources in the surrounding area,” Dalley said.

Another issue is that the RMP lists every unincorporated community in Nye County as part of the socioeconomic study but fails to characterize unincorporated communities in Clark County.
“…So how are they going to address our needs for public land if they haven’t even listed it in their socioeconomic study?” he asked.

In conclusion Dalley discussed the historical significant of the St. Thomas culture in the surrounding area and brought up a bill that was passed unanimously that identifies the unique culture.
“There is zero discussion in the characterization of a proposed RMP on the state law that specifically identifies this area as having unique St. Thomas culture,” he said.
Dalley said that the RMP does not provide a legitimate alternative and that it will take a minimum of one year to go through the current document.

Another concerned resident who made his voice heard was Overton Power District General Manager Mendis Cooper. Cooper expressed disapointemnt over the BLM’s lack of involvement and flow of information throughout the RMP process.
Cooper explained that the power district does a lot of work with the BLM.

“…we also incorporate Mesquite in our service territory,” he said. “So much of the work we do involved the BLM process between working between Overton, Logandale, Moapa, Mesquite and Bunkerville.”
“…I’ve been a little bit disappointed in the lack of information that’s been flowed to us,” Cooper said. “In fact there’s been no information that’s been flowed to us.”

He said that the power district’s regional plan was submitted to the BLM eight years ago and the agency is still working on it.
“And we have received no input in regard to that plan and their plan,” he said. “I am very concerned about that and I guess my simple suggestion is: until BLM follows their own regulations, which means they incorporate the thoughts and feelings of the local utilities and local community members, they should be unable to close this process and move forward with their plan until they’ve met their own criteria.”

Logandale resident Corey Dalley said that he represented 450 Boy Scouts and Scouters of the Anasazi District of the Boy Scout program in the community. He said that rural Scouters use public lands to accomplish goals of character-building with monthly campouts with each team or crew as well as large gatherings. He said that such activities are essential for building boys.

Dalley said that public lands have become increasingly less available to Scouting activities. He is now unable to take Scouts to places that he visited when he was a young Scout, he said.
“The current RMP does not address specific proposals on issues we have with how multiple use of public lands will be in the future,” he said. “This is about being able to go camping and using public lands to teach principles that will not only benefit Boy Scouts but the nation and the world as a whole. We need to suspend the comment period and come together to discuss and define a proposal that benefits the public and local community.”

No stranger to the BLM process nor the Moapa Valley community, Partners in Conservation administrator Elise McAllister also expressed her concerns regarding the proposed RMP.
“The new RMP will eliminate the ability to travel in washes,” she said. Washes have been a traditional way of travel for hiking, horseback riding and more, she added.

McAllister said that many residents access public lands from the washes near their own homes and that even minor floods erase any and all ATV tracks and do more damage to vegetation in washes than anything else.
“…so I’m concerned that this is going to be eliminated,” she said.
She also expressed concerns over the lack of grazing in the Gold Butte area and the removal of historical mining structures since the elimination of mining over 30 years ago.

“As you remove those uses (grazing and mining) from the land then the buildings and structures that have been there forever and mines and old corrals and windmills, those no longer have an active permit associated with them,” McAllister said. “So the BLM doesn’t see them as historical, they see them as being a disturbance on the land.”

McAllister stated that the Visual Resource Management aspect of land use is that anything that is human is not pretty and that removing the historical structures allows a higher class of visual resources to be applied to the land.

In another comment, Collins addressed the board and said that grazing is still allowed in the Gold Butte area in Areas of Critical Environmental Concern for experimental burn control.
He referenced Carson City where fire problems don’t exist on grazing areas and do exist where grazing has been eliminated.
He again thanked those who participated in the meeting.

“Since we’re all law abiding citizens most the time, we’ve got to figure out what’s the least intrusive,” he said. “So we say ‘BLM don’t do nothing.’ But one of the important things is we require the BLM to not only extend the comment period but also require them not to just close an area because they don’t have the resources to take care of it.”

“The bottom line is God bless you for coming down to this meeting and making comments,” he said, emphasizing each comment must be written down and sent in to the BLM for validity.